According to Diamond Geezer, blogging is endangered and outdated, because what’s the point of reading something when you could be listening to it instead?
Taking his advice I’ve made a podcast (well, strictly speaking, I just talked about myself, Sheila actually made the recording); All About You: Everyone has a story.
So instead of reading about a London cabbie and any eclectic capital centric subject that’s taken his fancy, how much better to simply sit back, press play and let my words wash all over you in handy audible chunks.
No longer will you need to find your reading glasses or pinch your smartphone screen so that the text appears in a legible size before you can read about The Knowledge. Instead, just press play and absorb my journey as a cabbie without expending any effort whatsoever.
Listen on your morning commute assuming you still have one, use it as your jogging soundtrack, mull it over during your afternoon tea break or use it as an aid to drift off to sleep. You can rewind should you want to further absorb my dulcet tones, or fast forward past any points you’ve already heard spoken by every London cabbie.
Although it may not be so great for you, because you have to invest half an hour of your day to listen to everything I have to say about London. At least with text you can read the first bit and skim down to get the general gist, or decide you don’t want to read any of the rest and go off and do something more productive. You’ll spend far less time reading something I wrote than I spent writing it, whereas with a podcast the time penalty is identical. Normally I spend hours writing text, cropping photos, checking references and adding links, but absolutely none of that is necessary to create an audio file. Instead, I simply talk for half an hour and Sheila edited and embed the file, which was brilliant.
I hope you enjoy listening to the podcast as much as I’ve enjoyed making it. What I particularly liked was that the podcast only took half an hour to make, well it would have if my laptop hadn’t sounded like a train, necessitating a second recording using my iPhone.
And if that’s not enough of me, the inner workings of my brain (but not my brain’s size) are discussed in detail on the Every Little Thing Podcast.
CabbieBlog 
In other words we’re going from the ‘silent movies to the talkies’. Your blog is one of the top 5 blogs online. It’s concise & informative. Generally with a first time visit to a blog the first sentence is crucial for me. If it passes that test then test 2 is a quick scroll down to make sure it’s not too long & ‘grammer & spillings are propa’ English. The other advantage with a written blog is it’s easier to save small bits of important text which is, at best cumbersome & at worst impossible with ‘the verbals’. Podcasts probably are ok for commuting to work on the Tube etc.. To put it another way, if a new blog site started up from scratch doing just podcasts I wouldn’t bother with it. My view of podcasts is tainted by YouTube where 99% of channels are utter garbage run by total imbeciles. My gut feeling now that Facebook [I dislike FB intensely.] is taking on YouTube is that the future of ‘visual/verbal blogging’ is with FB as it has 1.88 billion users per day compared to YouTube’s ‘measly’ 122 million. Anyway good luck with your podcasts & thanks for a brilliant blog.
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I love that: Silent movies to the talkies. Thanks for the kind encouragement for CabbieBlog’s posts and my command of English gramma. I’ll only be contributing to podcasts from time to time, certainly not making them. Yes you won’t find CabbieBlog on Facebook either.
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It was a real pleasure having David as a guest and his patience to do two recording don’t you just love technology. Keep that motor running David
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Thanks Sheila I look forward to listening to your other contributors.
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I might give it a listen, though as a rule, I rarely listen to podcasts. I like the silence, as there is enough noise in our lives to start with. Then again, I am admittedly old-fashioned, and happy to stay that way.
Best wishes, Pete.
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It will give you a chance to listen to a cabbie’s opinions without having to pay for the fare!!
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I usually ended up debating why they had chosen a particular route. Especially when stuck in solid traffic in Kingsway because they didn’t go through The City and over London Bridge. 🙂
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For a few pence more they gave you the ‘scenic’ route.
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